“Host” fucked me up and is the reason I don’t watch horror movies anymore. I’m a huge baby though.

I’m proud of you. Linux Mint was my first daily-driver distro and it’s still one I’d recommend to newcomers. I hope you have a great time with it!

I love finding similarities like these, and the one you mentioned about teletype is a new but really cool interpretation to me. Though I tend to view things more mechanically than naturally; I love playing factory games like Factorio and Satisfactory. I guess the natural metaphor I use most is the human body, which is a really complex system with lots of interacting subsystems. I forgot the name of the book & author but a medical doctor wrote a book on complex systems and said that any sufficiently complex system, like the human body, is always dealing with some degree of failure, so any artificial system needs to be fault-tolerant at many levels to continue functioning properly.

I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

Check out gamemode if you’re gaming, it should improve performance a little bit

What worked for me is learning some better letterforms from some free images from the Write Now book (by Getty-Dubay) on italic cursive. It’s a different kind of cursive from the awkward one I was taught in school, and it’s a lot easier to write and read.

I think the biggest improvement in my handwriting was just finding letterforms in that book that are both easy to write but that are also more clearly distinguishable when you write quickly. For example, just putting a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase T’s, I’s, and L’s made them a lot more aesthetically pleasing but also more clearly distinct from other letters.

Once you find some letterforms like that, it just takes a little practice to rewrite your muscle memory.

Homebrew is so fun, and I love how you can make it as complex as you want. Like, you can just mix some honey and some water (in the right ratio) and let it sit, and you’ve got mead! Or you can add flavors. Or experiment with yeasts. Or brew beer and experiment with hops and grains. It’s a hobby that really meets you where you want it to.

I recently got into video game development, and I’ve had so much fun, and it’s given me some much-needed meaning. I’ve solved problems unique to my game using programming skills as well as game design skills, and it feels meaningful because i can send it to my friends and they can enjoy it without needing to appreciate any of the technical aspects. I get to be creative about how people I care about can have more fun. It could also involve your music composition hobby, since every good game needs some music and sound design! I’m a programmer for my day job so most things I do there are only meaningful to other programmers, and the problems I solve there are incredibly boring ones.

Edit: I saw your comment about being burnt out on programming, and I totally understand that. That happens to me frequently. I enjoy programming as a hobby when I’m not burnt out so we’re kinda in different boats there. There are lots of skills involved in making games and the variety has really refreshed me, though I’ve still gotten sick of sitting at a computer while working on it.

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.

Why is nobody talking about the mouthfeel?

Many tools that use GPG, especially package managers, will download keys so they can verify signatures. It’s nothing to worry about. That developer probably signed something you use.

I’m lucky enough that a couple of my friends are willing to use Matrix to message me, but most communities I’m a part of are on Discord.

At least you’re using Duke’s, clear evidence you’re still sane.

This is the nature of the world, here. When I see the world, the politics, the future, the satellites in space, and the people that put them there, you could look at everything as a man and a cat.

Then they put on the socks and become girls

Fair

I’ll bring some of that Giggleswick ganja

Only if we go to Fattiehead first